The Weight of Maintainership

In April 2025, Bayerischer Rundfunk, a German public broadcaster, released an episode of the "Wild Wild Web" podcast about my open-source journey.
I talked to André for two days. I never thought I could talk for so long about my own story or that the result would feel so personal.

The producers went deep into the story of Log4shell, the long nights of maintenance, the feelings of burnout, and the question that all maintainers ask themselves:

Who will fix it when I stop?

They called the episode “Das wichtigste Hobby der Welt” (The Most Important Hobby in the World). That phrase stayed with me. It reminded me that what began as curiosity and joy slowly turned into duty. Can you still call it a hobby when it feels like work?

As long as I sacrificed my nights and inner peace, nobody talked about it. Only when it failed did I become more visible.
Not for what I built, but for what I broke. I didn't cause the vulnerability, and I didn't even write the code to fix it. I was just there, helping as best as I could.
Sometimes I joked: if you want success, make your software resilient; if you want fame, ship a security issue.

André listened. Eventually, I told him something that I rarely say: that I sometimes think about quitting. Just stop. Take my time back. He asked why I don't. Out came a sentence I never planned:

"Wer macht’s denn sonst?" (Who else will do it?)

Maintainers are replaceable. We know that, but we don't feel that.
The system might collapse without us, sometimes even with us.
Few step forward to maintain, so maybe we aren't replaceable because there is no one waiting to replace us.

A few months later, in Tokyo, a man stood up after my Log4shell talk.

"Christian, you are a hero."

I still wonder why he said that. I didn't write the fix. Maybe real heroism is not about the code at all, but about admitting how much it costs.

It took me years to speak about this.

→ Listen: Wild Wild Web – Das wichtigste Hobby der Welt (BR)

(Summary: A 37-minute German episode about my journey as an open-source maintainer. The story traces my path from a shy teenager to a wannabe rock musician to the Log4Shell crisis, showing how open source shaped my life and the human cost behind the software that keeps the Internet running.)

Tags: open source, burnout, maintainership, ethics, podcast